A Time of Changes

by Robert Silverberg

  Of course the reality was nothing so romantic. There was a place where the cliffs dipped to sea level and yielded to a crescent harbor, and here a squalid settlement existed, the shacks of a few dozen Sumarnu who had taken to living here so that they might meet the needs of such ships as occasionally did come from the northern continent. I had thought that all the Sumarnu lived somewhere in the interior, naked tribesmen camping down by the volcanic peak Vashnir, and that Schweiz and I would have to hack our way through the whole apocalyptic immensity of this mysterious land, unguided and uncertain, before we found what passed for civilization and made contact with anyone who might sell us that for which we had come. Instead, Captain Khrisch brought his little ship smartly to shore by a crumbling wooden pier, and as we stepped forth a small delegation of Sumarnu came to offer us a sullen greeting.

  You know my fantasy of fanged and grotesque Earthmen. So, too, I instinctively expected these people of the southern continent to look in some way alien. I knew it was irrational; they were, after all, sprung from the same stock as the citizens of Salla and Manneran and Glin. But had these centuries in the jungle not transformed them? Had their disavowal of the Covenant not laid them open to infiltration by the vapors of the forest, and turned them into unhuman things? No and no. They looked to me like peasants of any province’s back country. Oh, they wore unfamiliar ornaments, old jeweled pendants and bracelets of an un-Veladan sort, but there was nothing else about them, neither tone of skin nor shape of face nor color of hair, that set them apart from the men I had always known.

  There were eight or nine of them. Two, evidently the leaders, spoke the dialect of Manneran, though with a troublesome accent. The others showed no sign of understanding northern languages, but chattered among themselves in a tongue of clicks and grunts. Schweiz found communication easier than I did, and entered into a long conversation, so difficult for me to follow that I soon ceased to pay attention. I wandered off to inspect the village, and was inspected in turn by goggle-eyed children—the girls here walked about naked even after they were of the age when their breasts had sprouted—and when I returned Schweiz said, “It’s all arranged.”

  “What is?”

  “Tonight we sleep here. Tomorrow they’ll guide us to a village that produces the drug. They don’t guarantee we’ll be allowed to buy any.”

  “Is it only sold at certain places?”

  “Evidently. They swear there’s none at all available here.”

  I said, “How long a journey will it be?”

  “Five days. On foot. Do you like jungles, Kinnall?”

  “I don’t know the taste of them yet.”

  “It’s a taste you’re going to learn,” said Schweiz.

  He turned now to confer with Captain Khrisch, who was planning to go off on some expedition of his own along the Sumaran coast. Schweiz arranged to have our ship back at this harbor waiting for us when we returned from our trip into the jungle. Khrisch’s men unloaded our baggage—chiefly trade-goods for barter, mirrors and knives and trinkets, since the Sumarnu had no use for Veladan currency—and got their ship out into the strait before night fell.

  Schweiz and I had a shack for ourselves, on a lip of rock overlooking the harbor. Mattresses of leaves, blankets of animal hide, one lopsided window, no sanitary facilities: this is what the thousands of years of man’s voyage through the stars have brought us to. We haggled over the price of our lodgings, finally came to an agreement in knives and heat-rods, and at sundown were given our dinner. A surprisingly tasty stew of spicy meats, some angular red fruits, a pot of half-cooked vegetables, a mug of what might have been fermented milk—we ate what was given us, and enjoyed it more than either of us had expected, though we made edgy jokes about the diseases we were likely to catch. I poured out a libation to the god of travelers, more out of habit than conviction. Schweiz said, “So you still believe, after all?” I replied that I found no reason not to believe in the gods, though my faith in the teachings of men had been greatly weakened.

  This close to the equator, darkness came on swiftly, a sudden black curtain rolling down. We sat outside a little while, Schweiz favoring me with some more astronomy, and testing me on what I had already learned. Then we went to bed. Less than an hour later, two figures entered our shack; I was still awake and sat up instantly, imagining thieves or assassins, but as I groped for a weapon a stray moonbeam showed me the profile of one of the intruders, and I saw heavy breasts swinging. Schweiz, out of the dark far corner, said, “I think they’re included in tonight’s price.” Another instant and warm naked flesh pressed against me. I smelled a pungent odor, and touched a fat haunch and found it coated in some spicy oil: a Sumarnu cosmetic, I found out afterward. Curiosity warred with caution in me. As I had when a boy taking lodgings in Glain, I feared catching a disease from the loins of a woman of a strange race. But should I not experience the southern kind of loving? From Schweiz’s direction I heard the slap of meat on meat, hearty laughter, liquid lip-noises. My own girl wriggled impatiently. Parting the plump thighs, I explored, aroused, entered. The girl squirmed into what I suppose was the proper native position, lying on her side, facing me, one leg flung over me and her heel jammed hard against my buttocks. I had not had a woman since my last night in Manneran; that and my old problem of haste undid me, and I unloaded myself in the usual premature volleys. My girl called out something, probably in derision of my manhood, to her moaning and sighing companion in Schweiz’s corner, and got a giggled answer. In rage and chagrin I forced myself to revive and, pumping slowly, grimly, I ploughed her anew, though the stink of her breath nearly paralyzed me, and her sweat, mingling with her oil, formed a nauseous compound. Eventually I pushed her over the brink of pleasure, but it was cheerless work, a tiresome chore. When it was done she nipped my elbow with her teeth: a Sumarnu kiss, I think it was. Her gratitude. Her apology. I had done her good service after all. In the morning I scanned the village maidens, wondering which lass it was had honored me with her caresses. All of them gaptoothed, sagbreasted, fisheyed: let my couchmate have been none of the ones I saw. For days afterward I kept uneasy watch on my organ, expecting it each morning to be broken out in red spots or running sores; but all I caught from her was a distaste for the Sumarnu style of passion.

  41

  FIVE DAYS. Six, actually: either Schweiz had misunderstood, or the Sumarnu chieftain was poor at counting. We had one guide and three bearers. I had never walked so much before, from dawn to sunset, the ground yielding and bouncy beneath my feet. The jungle rising, a green wall, on both sides of the narrow path. Astonishing humidity, so that we swam in the air, worse than on the worst day in Manneran. Insects with jeweled eyes and terrifying beaks. Slithering many-legged beasts rushing past us. Strugglings and horrid cries in the underbrush, just beyond sight. The sunlight falling in dappled streaks, barely making it through the canopy high above. Flowers bursting from the trunks of trees: parasites, Schweiz said. One of them a puffy yellow thing that had a human face, goggly eyes, a gaping pollen-smeared mouth. The other even more bizarre, for from the midst of its red and black petals rose a parody of genitalia, a fleshy phallus, two dangling balls. Schweiz, shrieking with amusement, seized the first of these that we found, wrapped his hand around the floral cock, bawdily flirted with it and stroked it. The Sumarnu muttered things; perhaps they were wondering if they had done right to send girls to our shack that night.

  We crept up the spine of the continent, emerging from the jungle for a day and a half to climb a good-sized mountain, then more jungle on the other side. Schweiz asked our guide why we had not gone around the mountain instead of over it, and was told that this was the only route, for poison-ants infested all the surrounding lowlands: very cheering. Beyond the mountain lay a chain of lakes and streams and ponds, many of them thick with gray toothy snouts barely breaking the surface. All this seemed unreal to me. A few days’ sail to the north lay Velada Borthan, with its banking houses and its groundcars, its customs collectors and its godhouses
. That was a tamed continent, but for its uninhabitable interior. Man had made no impact at all, though, on this place where we marched. Its disorderly wildness oppressed me—that and the heavy air, the sounds in the night, the unintelligible conversations of our primitive companions.

  On the sixth day we came to the native village. Perhaps three hundred wooden huts were scattered over a broad meadow at a place where two rivers of modest size ran together. I had the impression that there once had been a larger town here, possibly even a city, for on the borders of the settlement I saw grassy mounds and humps, quite plausibly the site of ancient ruins. Or was that only an illusion? Did I need so badly to convince myself that the Sumarnu had regressed since leaving our continent, that I had to see evidences of decline and decay wherever I looked?

  The villagers surrounded us: not hostile, only curious. Northerners were uncommon sights. A few of them came close and touched me, a timid pat on the forearm, a shy squeeze of the wrist, invariably accompanied by a quick little smile. These jungle folk seemed not to have the sullen sourness of those who lived in the shacks by the harbor. They were gentler, more open, more childlike. Such little taint of Veladan civilization as had managed to stain the harbor folk had darkened their spirits; not so here, where contact with northerners was less frequent.

  An interminable parley began among Schweiz, our guide, and three of the village elders. After the first few moments Schweiz was out of it: the guide, indulging in long cascades of verbal embellishments footnoted by frantic gesticulations, seemed to be explaining the same thing over and over to the villagers, who constantly made the same series of replies to him. Neither Schweiz nor I could understand a syllable of it. At last the guide, looking agitated, turned to Schweiz and poured forth a stream of Sumarnu-accented Mannerangi, which I found almost wholly opaque but which Schweiz, with his tradesman’s skill at communicating with strangers, was able to penetrate. Schweiz said finally to me, “They’re willing to sell to us. Provided we can show them that we’re worthy of having the drug.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “By taking some with them, at a love-ritual this evening. Our guide’s been trying to talk them out of it, but they won’t budge. No communion, no merchandise.”

  “Are there risks?” I asked.

  Schweiz shook his head. “It doesn’t seem that way to me. But the guide has the idea that we’re only looking for profit in the drug, that we don’t mean to use it ourselves but intend to go back to Manneran and sell what we get for many mirrors and many heat-rods and many knives. Since he thinks we aren’t users, he’s trying to protect us from exposure to it. The villagers also think we aren’t users, and they’re damned if they’ll turn a speck of the stuff over to anyone who’s merely planning to peddle it. They’ll make it available only to true believers.”

  “But we are true believers,” I said.

  “I know. But I can’t convince our man of that. He knows enough about northerners to know that they keep their minds closed at all times, and he wants to pamper us in our sickness of soul. But I’ll try again.”

  Now it was Schweiz and our guide who parleyed, while the village chiefs stood silent. Adopting the gestures and even the accent of the guide, so that both sides of the conversation became unintelligible to me, Schweiz pressed and pressed and pressed, and the guide resisted all that the Earthman was telling him, and a feeling of despair came over me so that I was ready to suggest that we give up and go empty-handed back to Manneran. Then Schweiz somehow broke through. The guide, still suspicious, clearly asked Schweiz whether he really wanted what he said he wanted, and Schweiz emphatically said he did, and the guide, looking skeptical, turned once more to the village chiefs. This time he spoke only briefly with them, and then briefly again with Schweiz. “It’s been settled,” Schweiz told me. “We’ll take the drug with them tonight.” He leaned close and touched my elbow. “Something for you to remember. When you go under: be loving. If you can’t love them, all is lost.”

  I was offended that he had found it necessary to warn me.

  42

  TEN OF THEM CAME for us at sundown and led us into the forest east of the village. Among them were the three chieftains and two other older men, along with two young men and three women. One of the women was a handsome girl, one a plain girl, and one quite old. Our guide did not go with us; I am not sure whether he was not invited to the ceremony or simply did not feel like taking part.

  We marched a considerable distance. No longer could we hear the cries of children in the village or the barking of domestic animals. Our halting-place was a secluded clearing, where hundreds of trees had been felled and the dressed logs laid out in five rows as benches, to form a pentagonal amphitheater. In the middle of the clearing was a clay-lined fire-pit, with a great heap of firewood neatly stacked beside it; as soon as we arrived, the two young men commenced building a towering blaze. On the far side of the woodpile I saw a second clay-lined pit, about twice as wide as a large man’s body; it descended diagonally into the ground and gave the appearance of being a passage of no little depth, a tunnel offering access to the depths of the world. By the glow of the firelight I tried to peer into it from where I stood, but I was unable to see anything of interest.

  Through gestures the Sumarnu showed us where we should sit: at the base of the pentagon. The plain girl sat beside us. To our left, next to the tunnel entrance, sat the three chiefs. To our right, by the fire-pit, were the two young men. In the far right corner sat the old woman and one of the old men; the other old man and the handsome girl went to the far left corner. Full darkness was upon us by the time we were seated. The Sumarnu now removed what little clothing they wore, and, seeing them obviously beckoning to us to do the same, Schweiz and I stripped, piling our clothes on the benches behind us. At a signal from one of the chiefs the handsome girl rose and went to the fire, poking a bough into it until she had a torch; then, approaching the slanting mouth of the tunnel, she wriggled awkwardly feet-first into it, holding the torch high. Girl and torch disappeared entirely from view. For a little while I could see the flickering light of the firebrand coming from below, but soon it went out, sending up a gust of dark smoke. Shortly the girl emerged, without the torch. In one hand she carried a thick-rimmed red pot, in the other a long flask of green glass. The two old men—high priests?—left their benches and took these things from her. They began a tuneless chant, and one, reaching into the pot, scooped from it a handful of white powder—the drug!—and dropped it into the flask. The other solemnly shook the flask from side to side in a mixing motion. Meanwhile the old woman—a priestess?—had prostrated herself by the mouth of the tunnel and began to chant in a different intonation, a jagged gasping rhythm, while the two young men flung more wood on the fire. The chanting continued for a good many minutes. Now the girl who had descended into the tunnel—a slim high-breasted wench with long silken red-brown hair—took the flask from the old man and brought it to our side of the fire, where the plain girl, stepping forward, received it reverently with both hands. Solemnly she carried it to the three seated chieftains and held it toward them. The chieftains now joined the chanting for the first time. What I thought of as the Rite of the Presentation of the Flask went on and on; I was fascinated at first, finding delight in the strangeness of the ceremony, but soon I grew bored and had to amuse myself by trying to invent a spiritual content for what was taking place. The tunnel, I decided, symbolized the genital opening of the world-mother, the route to her womb, where the drug—made from a root, from something growing underground—could be obtained. I devised an elaborate metaphorical construct involving a mother-cult, the symbolic meaning of carrying a lighted torch into the world-mother’s womb, the use of plain and handsome girls to represent the universality of womanhood, the two young fire-warders as guardians of the chieftains’ sexual potency, and a great deal more, all of it nonsense, but—so I thought—an impressive enough scheme to be assembled by a bureaucrat like myself, of no great intellectual powers. My plea
sure in my own musings evaporated abruptly when I realized how patronizing I was being. I was treating these Sumarnu like quaint savages, whose chants and rites were of mild aesthetic interest but could not possibly have any serious content. Who was I to take this lofty attitude? I had come to them, had I not, begging the drug of enlightenment that my soul craved; which of us then was the superior being? I assailed myself for my snobbery. Be loving. Put aside courtly sophistication. Share their rite if you can, and at the least show no contempt for it, feel no contempt, have no contempt. Be loving. The chieftains were drinking now, each taking a sip, handing the flask back to the plain-looking girl, who when all three had sipped began to move about the circle, bringing the flask first to the old men, then to the old woman, then to the handsome girl, then to the young fire-tenders, then to Schweiz, then to me. She smiled at me as she gave me the flask. By the fire’s leaping light she seemed suddenly beautiful. The flask contained a warm gummy wine; I nearly gagged as I drank. But I drank. The drug entered my gut and journeyed thence to my soul.

  43

  WE ALL BECAME ONE, the ten of them and the two of us. First there were the strange sensations of going up, the heightening of perception, the loss of bearings, the visions of celestial light, the hearing of eerie sounds; then came the detecting of other heartbeats and bodily rhythms about me, the doubling, the overlapping of awarenesses; then came the dissolution of self, and we became one, who had been twelve. I was plunged into a sea of souls and I perished. I was swept into the center of all things. I had no way of knowing whether I was Kinnall the septarch’s son, or Schweiz the man of old Earth, or the fire-tenders, or the chiefs, or the priests, or the girls, or the priestess, for they were inextricably mixed up in me and I in them. And the sea of souls was a sea of love. How could it be anything else than that? We were each other. Love of self bound us each to each, all to all. Love of self is love of others; love of others is love of self. And I loved. I knew more clearly than ever why Schweiz had said to me, I love you, as we were coming out of the drug the first time—that odd phrase, so obscene on Borthan, so incongruous in any case when man is speaking to man. I said to the ten Sumarnu, I love you, though not in words, for I had no words that they would understand, and even if I had spoken to them in my own tongue and they had understood, they would have resented the foulness of my words, for among my people I love you is an obscenity, and no help for it. I love you. And I meant it, and they accepted the gift of my love. I who was part of them. I who not long ago had patronized them as amusing primitives worshiping bonfires in the woods. Through them I sensed the sounds of the forest and the heaving of the tides, and, yes, the merciful love of the great world-mother, who lies sighing and quaking beneath our feet, and who has bestowed on us the drug-root for the healing of our sundered selves. I learned what it is to be Sumarnu and live simply at the meeting-place of two small rivers. I discovered how one can lack groundcars and banking houses and still belong to the community of civilized humanity. I found out what half-souled things the people of Velada Borthan have made of themselves in the name of holiness, and how whole it is possible to be, if one follows the way of the Sumarnu. None of this came to me in words or even in a flow of images, but rather in a rush of received knowledge, knowledge that entered and became part of me after a manner I can neither describe nor explain. I hear you saying now that I must be either lying or lazy, to offer you as little specific detail of the experience as I have done. But I reply that one cannot put into words that never was in words. One can deal only in approximations, and one’s best effort can be nothing more than a distortion, a coarsening of the truth. For I must transform perceptions into words and set them down as my skills permit, and then you must pick my words from the page and convert them into whatever system of perceptions your mind habitually employs, and at each stage of this transmission a level of density leaches away, until you are left only with the shadow of what befell me in the clearing in Sumara Borthan. So how can I explain? We were dissolved in one another. We were dissolved in love. We who had no language in common came to total comprehension of our separate selves. When the drug at length lost its hold on us, part of me remained in them and part of them remained in me. If you would know more than that, if you would have a glimpse of what it is to be released from the prison of your skull, if you would taste love for the first time in your life, I say to you, Look for no explanations fashioned out of words, but put the flask to your lips. Put the flask to your lips.